The dark interior of the house reflecting a heavily overcast morning didn't seem like a particularly good way to start the day, but what we get is what we must accept. It's far cheerier to one's mood on awakening without a shadow of a doubt, to be greeted by a bright interior. The front of our house lights up spectacularly on an early sunny morning, it's so bright as to be dazzling. Not yesterday morning.

And it didn't take long for rain to develop. Which we were to expect off-and-on throughout the day, according to the weather forecast. Jackie and Jillie don't particularly mind. They like to laze about the house on inclement-weather days. Come to think of it, we don't mind all that much, either. And yesterday morning's weather gave me the push I needed to continue cleaning out kitchen cupboards in my annual spring cleaning preoccupation.

And then, just like flipping a switch, out came the sun, rain finished. As we were to later learn, finished for the day, in fact, although the day gave us plenty of scudding white-and-grey clouds interspersed with bright sunlight.

What the day also brought was brutal winds. The high for the day was 7C, presaging a big wallop of melt accompanying the presence of warmth and sun. And so we found, when we took Jackie and Jillie out to the ravine, that the trails had turned slushy where only the day before they were firm and icy. Along with that, large areas of bare ground had begun appearing. Concomitantly the creek was fuller and bursting with frenetic action thanks to the added meltwater after the rain. Spring is seriously making a breakthrough.

And yesterday introduced us to the presence of a hitherto-unmet dog ambling through the trails with a woman who was minding him for a week while her daughter and son-in-law took a break from normal life, and had gone abroad for a week to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. This was a big fellow, with shaggy black hair, part poodle and part something else that had produced a fine looking specimen of a dog.

Only two years old, this fellow wanted to play. He loomed in size over Jackie and Jillie, his presence not quite delighting them, leaving them intimidated and barking at what they took to be an uninvited intruder into their personal forest; the nerve! The good-humoured giant puppy wanted to play but his overtures to two little hostile dogs looking like fragile miniatures of itself went nowhere. Both Jackie and Jillie wanted to be picked up in this dog's presence, though it presented no threat to them.

The way that dogs sometimes react in the presence of others of their species is not unalike the way that humans express their suspicion and dislike of others based on fear, absent threat. Seems a pity. Our two don't hesitate to make friends with and become comfortable in the presence of other large dogs of various breeds. Why they would shy away from doing so with this dog they had encountered for the first time is a mystery.

We later came across another dog accompanying an old acquaintance of ours. Now this dog has always displayed an unpleasant inclination to mount other dogs, and it is for this reason that Jackie and Jillie are nervous in his presence and dislike the dog's propensity to corner them. On our part, it takes vigilance to make certain this bulky, shaggy creature doesn't prevail and smother one of ours, less than a quarter size of the aggravator whose human rarely takes notice...

All the while we were out, the wind raged about us and well above where we stood, its roars through the canopy high above threatening. It's during high winds like this that branches can be dislodged, that tree trunks in poor condition can break and fall. Some of the wilder bursts were extremely loud and forceful, making trees sway and bend, producing a choreographic dance sequence that left us agape.